A Thousand Silent Feet
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Published by Teleport Magazine - June 9th 2021
The silence before a storm is the deepest silence there is. A hot silence, full of electricity. Esha-Min stood patiently in the near-pitch darkness of a narrow tunnel, waiting. This passage joined her home straight to one of the main under-roads and was barely four feet wide. Very few people used it, preferring the wider, better lit side streets. Not that any of the women needed light to see, but when light could be got, it was good to get it.
Men were not the same. They could barely see beyond their noses in a fully lit room, let alone in darkness. And in this shadowy underworld where they understood so little and commanded so much, a reckoning was about to be had. There would be a signal, one that all of Mena-Gowa would hear, and then it would begin.
Esha-Min gripped the handle of her plain kitchen knife, feeling the reassuring weight of the cool, well-worn stone against her palm. It was the longest blade she had but it was barely longer than her hand.
A soft foot tapped on the tunnel floor, ten feet to her left. A light, small footfall of someone walking on the balls of her feet.
Esha-Min didn’t try to see who it was, her companion was expected. “Alain?”
“Yes.” Alain murmured, her light voice flattened into quiet by the back of her tongue. Her rough clothes whispered as she leant against the opposite wall. “What did you bring?”
“A knife.” Esha-Min answered. The sound cut through the dark and she suppressed a cough. “And a hammer.” The little weight of it pulled reassuringly at her belt. It was not big, but it would suffice.
Alain breathed out through her teeth. She approved. “I have a knife. That is all.”
A minute went by in silence before Esha-Min sensed the air on her right compress ever-so-slightly. “Ryeth, is that you?”
Ryeth made the rhythmic hollow noise of near-silent laughter in the back of her throat. “If I said no, what would you do?” Her voice was deep and would have resonated in the stone passage if she didn’t articulate with air rather than sound.
Esha-Min made a soft kuk sound that meant smile. “Knife you, in all likelihood.” Alain silent-laughed darkly. “What have you got?”
“A hammer from the mine.” Ryeth breathed, and they heard the soft, rhythmic thump of heavy metal on a bare palm.
For years there had been no sound. Women were not allowed to talk; they were not taught. Girls and boys were separated in childhood and if a woman even learned to articulate a thought, she was imprisoned, or worse. Men did not speak to them. It was thought they didn’t know how, and that even if women had learned their language they would never have understood each other anyway. But in the darkness, in the solitary times when the men were elsewhere, the women began to make their own words. Sounds passed by shades of quiet from one hearth to the next, until the silence hummed…
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